The message sent by this thread is pretty ironic, coming as it does from Cone and corbs, two of the biggest acolytes of The Howard Zinn Revisionist School of American History, the biggest academic disgrace of the last quarter of the 20th century.

You can't just teach kids, hey, everybody did it back then, because not everybody did do it back then, and a lot of people were organized and vocal in their opposition at the time.

Well, that is a distortion of what they said, Ed. They said:

“The thing we need to focus on about the founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed, to everybody — not all equally instantly — and it was their progress that we need to look at,” said Rounds, whose website identifies him as a Vietnam War veteran of the Air Force and FedEx retiree who became a lawyer in 1995.

Sometimes progress can only be recognized against a matrix, the removal of which diminishes the appearance of the progress. In this case the matrix of resistance to liberty, which took the form of what we call racism today, in which liberty was introduced, not only limited liberty at that time, but also served to highlight the achievements of the founding fathers. In part, the greatness of their achievements is directly related to the resistance to them. So when you attempt to diminish the entrenched racism of the period and overvalue the work of proto abolitionists you devalue the achievements of the founding fathers, the very individuals who's work eventually lead to liberty for all.

And that is what the Tea Party folks are defending against, the devaluing of liberty you promote in these few words:

One of the (many) problems with this nonsense is that it ignores the heated debates about these things among the Founders themselves.

You can't just teach kids, hey, everybody did it back then, because not everybody did do it back then, and a lot of people were organized and vocal in their opposition at the time.

Poli, "the Tea Party Folks are defending against.. the devaluing of liberty" by insisting that we not point out too clearly that they too were slaveholders. Is that basically it? Listen, I'm not entirely unsympathetic to your argument, if I felt it actually applied. For all the wailing and gnashing and whatnot, I've yet to see American History curricula at any level, save for perhaps some esoteric college level courses, that focussed more on the Founders warts than on their very real achievements. That's why I can't help but see this as a highly motivated group attempting to mold history education to fit a very precise (and not entirely accurate) narrative. That's kind of the opposite of education, in my opinion.

poli, based on the quote you provided and your subsequent framing, the term "instantly" is used in such a vague manner it could suggest that slaves were next on the founding father's liberty docket -- to be served the week after land owners, politicians, the clergy and businessmen -- as opposed to the reality of it not occurring until well after the founding father's grandchildren were dead, buried and rotting.

the founding fathers made revolutionary changes in both political and social constructs, establishing cultural paradigms that spat in the eye of governments all around the world (particularly the motherland), but those achievements ended at a certain point in time, poli. and that point didn't include much of a lead into the civil right's front... well, unless you consider "all men are created equal" to be secret code for "all men are created equal, including slaves and indigenous people, where the former will be emancipated down the road in a bloody civil war and the latter given voting rights 15 years later (and a casino and liquor store even farther down the line)... oh yeah, there will also be a great man who stands up and says the things that can only be said in the 1960's about inequality and get gunned down in the same matrix of intolerance that we face today... and god bless the queers and the rights of the women who give birth to us all."

let's try sticking to the facts, whatever they may be, ok? the founding fathers laid out a template, but actual american citizens -- caught up in *our* matrix of ignorance -- have been making these progressive inroads for the last 235 years. as elliot insinuates, if you're not a fan of a specific balance of factual history being taught in particular public education environments, that's one thing; making excuses to diminish actual, factual history is quite another.